


from eden

by simplyprologue



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Future Fic, Kid Fic, Post-Post-Apocalypse, Reunions, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-14 05:02:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10529487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: The door closes on the bunker in Polis, and Abby is slowly bleeding into her brain. The door closes, and he’s on the other side of it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** For the KabbyFam Slackru. This is a bit of an odd thing? But the premise is somewhat self-explanatory, I think: Abby and Marcus in separate bunkers, when praimfiya hits. Very likely to be a niche season four AU.

Peace is a fragile thing, especially in times like these, and so he is to spend the next five years locked in with Azgedakru behind the airlock doors of Farm Station. Between three bunkers they have close to a thousand refugees, three dozen radiation suits, and half rations to last them a year if they don’t all kill each other first. But Marcus thinks Echo might just be the reasonable sort, and loyal enough to not act without her king’s order, and Roan is staying in Polis to rule over the Azgeda third of the Second Dawn refuge.

The door closes on the bunker in Polis, and Abby is slowly bleeding into her brain. The door closes, and he’s on the other side of it.

She’ll be dead in months.

And she’s asked him not to watch her die, as if love is anything but. _Make sure that we live, after. There’s nothing you can do for me._

It’s a future Abby will never see, but if five years living with a hundred of the Azgeda might keep Clarke — and the rest of them, all the children they sent plummeting to near-certain death, and definitely sent into a war, these children who are children no more — safe, then he’ll do as she asks of him.

Make sure that the rest of them get to live.

It doesn’t make saying goodbye any easier.

The radios will be the first to cut out when praimfiya hits, the clouds too thick for any signal to get through. The uncertainty gnaws a hole in his chest — will he know, when she dies? Will he feel it, some wound in his universe tearing open? Will he wake one day, and know that her touch only lives as a memory?

In the last hour, they bend their heads together.

_May we meet again._

 

 

The world ends. Then it begins again. And it’s as simple as that. They wait forty days once the Geiger counter reads that the radiation is once again in the safe zone, just to make sure that it’s not a fluke. Then, with the pull of a lever, they all feel the sun on their skin again.

“Was this what it was like?” Echo asks, peeling off her layers of fur to bask in it. “When Skaikru first fell to Earth?”

She falls back into the tall untamed grass.

Marcus blinks into the brightness.

“More,” he says. The world is over and begun again, and Abby is dead. He will have to face that soon, that she is not here, staring into the sun again. “It was so much more. Forty years in space, and then… six months later, back inside.”

“Which is worse?” she asks. “Knowing, or not knowing?”

He pauses, feeling warmth in his bones.

“I wouldn’t have traded those six months for a lifetime on the ground.”

 

 

 

Their wobbly legs carry them on a march to Polis, and for all that years pacing the halls of Farm Station tried to keep them active, the miles and miles they have to go catch up with them. There are little signs of life on the city’s edge, and even though they are weary, they do not stop.

The Earth has reclaimed much, ivy twining up the sides of buildings to pull crumbling brick to the ground. Grass, pushing up from between cobbles and cracks in the street. Trees, sprouting up from the ruins of the brownstones. They’re a scant hundred yards from the tower when they see the first evidence of survivors, freshly put-out fires. Then — whether it’s a product of adrenaline or the acoustics of the city — sound rushes in. Distant voices reach them, and the mouths they’re speaking out of visible moments later. A hunting party returning, a bonfire being built. They get closer, and can hear laughter tinkling like bells. Sounds of joy rising up to meet them like a wave, and when they are spotted — a cry rises up. A cheer, a shout, more people crawling out from the belly of the tower and spilling out onto the street.

At twenty paces he sees her, pushing through.

People letting her.

Marcus Kane has been brought to his knees before, life’s sudden and absurd cruelties have never spared him.

But this—

Abby pushes through the crowds, eyes only seeing him. Her lips form his name, and even if he cannot hear her through the din, he knows the sound of his name out of her mouth well enough that his mind plays the sound like an old, well-loved recording. It feels like his legs might give out in the ten steps between them and they fall together, like two dying stars collapsing into each other.

“How?” he breathes, arms wrapping around her shoulders.

His only answer is his name, over and over again, in his ear.

“How?” he asks again, burying his face into his neck. All around them, reunions are happening, but everyone else leaves them alone. What kind of miracle of God or science, he does not know. “How, Abby?”

Unable to keep his eyes off her for very long, he pulls away, frames her face with his hands, strokes his thumbs over her cheekbones.

Her mouth gapes open, an explanation forming and dying on her tongue.

Shaking her head, she smiles. Nervously, perhaps, or as uncertain of the sun as he is. She stands, bracing herself on his shoulders, turning to look behind her. By habit, he follows her gaze, stumbling to his feet.

At the front of the crowds is Clarke, with a dark-haired child on her hip, the small girl clutching to her. Behind her is Roan, then Octavia, then Monty. More children who are no longer that, each watching, but none advancing. The child hides her face in Clarke’s shirt, twining her long legs around Clarke’s thighs. Then Clarke ducks her head, whispering something in the girl’s ear, setting her down.

Abby holds out her hand. “Come on sweetie, don’t be shy.”

Not a toddler, Marcus thinks, reminded of his inexperience with children. He has no idea how old this one is. Thinks, for a second that is a flash in his brain and then over, that maybe this child is a nightblood, or maybe even Clarke’s. The girl, dark-haired and long of limb at even her young age, looks back at Clarke and the rest of the once-delinquents for encouragement. Then, face wrought into nervous angles, she darts to Abby, clinging to her legs.

Marcus kneels down, and sees his own eyes looking back at him.

“How?” he whispers, amazed. Then, “When?”

“With everything else, I…” Abby kneels too, needlessly neatening the girl’s braids. “I missed all the symptoms. She came five months after Priamfiya. The first baby of our new world.”

His daughter’s lips turn up into a familiar smile, and it breaks his heart.

“Do you know who this is, baby girl?”

She looks at him, more solemn that any four-year-old has any right to be. “Papa.”

And in that moment, Marcus thinks he might know what it feels like to be burned alive. His vision hemmed with tears, he lifts a careful hand, tenderly cups her cheek. He does not even know her name. He does not need to. Every second and minute he’s missed culminates in the feel of her child-delicate skin under his fingertips. What he’s missed will kill him, every laugh and every cry, but the weight as she leans into his touch is what will reanimate his bones every time he will think to mourn.

“That’s right. I’m your Papa,” he rasps, voice thick with emotion. “And what’s your name?”

Her lips part, revealing crooked teeth.

“Eden.”

Everything is done and undone. Like the sear of a cauter on a wound, he is whole again and jagged. Hurting, but healing. He looks at Abby, and at their daughter. Tears rise up, and spill over.

The world is brighter than the sun.

 

 

 

In the days after they first left the bunker she worried, endlessly. What if the seals on Farm Stations hadn’t held? What if Marcus was long-dead, either by the insidious creep of radiation or the sharpness of a blade? And what if he had lived, but thought her long dead? What if he moved on, found solace with another? But none of it has come to pass, and Marcus steps back into her life. Not as easily as he might have, without Eden, the child they share making the negotiations slightly awkward although no less full of love.

The night ends with venison on the fire, picked over and eaten, dancing to drums and music played on tinny speakers. The hour grows late, the sky plunging them into darkness.

Having been thoroughly entertained and tired out by her siblings, by blood and by bond, Eden pads over to them and with no warning, crawls into Marcus’ lap, curls up like a cat, and falls asleep.

The look of shock on his face — for the third or fourth time today — is plain.

But it’s the first time she laughs at it.

“I guess she likes me,” he murmurs, tentatively resting his hand atop her head. For several long, easy minutes there is nothing but the sound of waning revelry and the crackling of the tall fire. Then, finally remembering what he’d been distracted from earlier, swept up into future despite the questions the past five years still hold, he asks, “How, Abby?”

“Do you have any complaints?” she asks, with only a bare hint of seriousness. Languid and with a belly full of moonshine, she slumps against him.

Turning his head, he brushes his mouth against her temple. “Of course not.”

It’s their child.

He loves her. She figured he would.

With a sigh, she rests her hand over his, tracing the round of his thumb with her own. “Stem cells. Eden is — she’s a nightblood.” Her voice chokes off. “I was dying — I was. Clarke and Jackson delivered her early, we didn’t think I would — I would make it. We didn’t know if _she_ would make it, but it seemed like the best course of action. So we decided to deliver her.”

There was no anesthetic but ether, but no choice but for them to wait for her to die, and for the baby to wither within her. She forces herself to speak as though she has put the dark days following the wave of fire behind her, and perhaps she has, she realizes, looking at Marcus. Perhaps they’re behind all of them, now, all the horrible choices that they’ve made.

Everything lost is now returned.

“But… Clarke decided to extract her own marrow, make her own serum and… well, Eden and I both lived,” she explains, closing her eyes. What she knows of those days is not from memory. “They harvested the stem cells from her umbilical cord and treated them and injected them into my brain. They repaired the damage from the radiation in the EMP. I don’t remember much, until Eden was strong enough that I could hold her, and she was so… so small. She was so weak… we both were. I didn’t think we were going to make it, I thought I had sentenced her to death.”

Instead, she is a robust child, screeching and running and playing pretend with a stick in her hand as her sword.

“Of course she lived,” Marcus says, looking at her, surprised. “She’s your daughter.”

It’s forgiveness, or the absolution of not needing it. He does not condemn her for what she’s spent years punishing herself for.

In the lonely down in the bunker, the _what ifs_ had piled up.

“We never hid who you were, or where you were,” she says, then. Under their hands, Eden dreams, maybe of long summer days or maybe of fairy tales, of kings and queens. “She’s heard stories about you, from all the kids. She’s asked questions, I’ve answered them.”

“We have time,” he says.

They don’t know that, not for certain. But he thinks he has the answer to Echo’s question, that not-knowing is better than knowing. It’s the uncertainty that makes things strong. And where children are fragile, parents can be strong.

Eden dreams.

They will make sure the fragile corners of her world hold together.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are very much appreciated.


End file.
